Wasteland sequel given $3m green light Plans to bring back the post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland will go ahead after a Kickstarter project mustered more than enough funds to give the project the green light. Wasteland 2 A team headed by Interplay founder and famed games developer Brian Fargo sought financial backing of at least $1m (£625,400) for the PC version of …
Even if (like me) you thought Magna Cum Laude was a decent game, LSL was killed by the developers themselves when they released the "So Bad It's Like The Worst Smell On Earth Farted After It Died" Box Office Bust (seriously, local tech store STILL has the game almost fully stocked on shelves, and last I saw it was listed for $2 just so they can get rid of it, with nobody taking it). Unless Al Lowe is involved this time (and I doubt he will be, since he was enjoying his retirement last I heard), I don't want to see anything else from the LSL franchise. Let it avoid the ignoble fait that Sonic is having to endure and just remember/play the glories of the past untarnished by present-day rust and decay.
I'd much rather someone pried the Space Quest and/or King's Quest licenses from Sierra/Activision's cold, dead hands and release the final games that end the series proper, as opposed to SQ6's open-ended stance leaving room for a sequal and KQ MoE's terrible, broken mess of a game (seriously, a game with massive levels of violence and killing as a capstone to a series known and loved for its aversion to and discouragement of same? Absolutely shameful attempt at a cash-grab, there).
Though a graphical update and/or remake of an old LSL game might be interesting. QFG2 VGA and KQ2 VGA (google them, they're free) have shown that it certainly can be done to success...
Sitll, all-in-all, considering the current owners of these series, I'd rather the past remain there and no further games are made.
I'm somewhat cynical about the 'stick it to the man' credentials of all this but both this and Pebble are interesting projects that I'm happy to have donated to, and Fargo's 'Kick It Forward' plan to redistribute profits is interesting.
Looking forward to a Kickstarter project where one of the rewards for funding is a share of the eventual profits - sort of distributed venture capital plan.
>sort of distributed venture capital plan.
Excellent thought, though probably only practical for larger donations, though I guess if donations were given some sort of nominal stock, which if (or when) the company made an IPO were guaranteed to become shares then it could work out.
So far on Kickstarter my donations have been for things that I think I would enjoy playing (code hero for example) but if there was an element of being a micro-investor then it might open up what I might be willing to donate to.
Is kickstarter a registered charity? can I claim my donations back form the taxman?
ttfn
This won't be a successful alternative to publishing house gaming until these games are successfully released. If these games, when released, turn out to be a steaming pile of crap the people who have backed them will become disillusioned by the process and it will die. Kickstarter is not without it's problematic projects.
The gaming industry has a hit and miss history on sequels. Of course, if they fail to put out a good Wasteland sequel we'll know who to blame. Can't pawn it off on the bean counters.
Yeah, then there's the current potential problem of these huge overly-successfull game projects creating a new economic mini-bubble as everyone and their grandma suddenly realizes that people will shell out millions for as little as "a good idea for a game" and jumps into the business, which will cause a massive flood of crap titles and may even result in a bust as frustrated doners abandon the scene, unsure what games to fund and what to avoid, not disimiliar to the notorious USA game market collapse of the early 80s.
Still, I don't worry too much about it now. The early stages has plenty of promise and potential, and I embrace it completely while it lasts.
Yeah, set the wayback machine to 1997 and that's exactly what "the pundits" were saying to Mr. Fargo and the Troika at Interplay when the original Fallout came out too. And they were so wrong I still smile. True, the glut of 1st Generation FPS crap and cookie-cutter real-time strategy doldrums seemed like a gold rush, and the best (pathetic) CRPG we had was the truly awful "The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall"...but Fallout changed all that by giving RPGers what we wanted, a real honest to god CRPG. And that opened the floodgates for the resurrection of the genre, which led to some of the most fantastic CRPGs ever made (Planescape: Torment) and some interesting fusion RPG shooters (Deus Ex, System Shock 2). Notably absent: Richard "Lord British" Garriott, who was too busy squandering Ultima's good name on terrible MMORPGs.
Newsflash for the idiots in the boardrooms today: not all of us are 13-year-old kiddies who think the only game ever invented was "Call of Duty." Wasteland 2? Sign me up. Just as long as they don't use that manual-based "copy protection" the original used.
Woohoo, we made it happen! $3 million to make a game bigger then the last, drawing on some of the most venerable and respected talents in the old-school RPG field! I never dreamed it would be possible for it to rise this high, especially not to $3M! We even got enough for them to make the promised user mod tools later!
Can't wait to see the final game in its finished form. Wonder what it's going to end up looking like...?
*form update* They're making RoboScrop TOUGHER?! What, were the Gods of Death not satisfied with the 30+ ranger corpses I offered up in gory sacrifice the FIRST time I faced it (to say nothing of the scores more in later reruns of the wastes)?!
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